Phil Hearse

Fires, floods and heatwaves are warning signs of a social order whose pursuit of endless accumulation is colliding with ecological limits, contends Phil Hearse.

Phil Hearse reviews William I Robinson’s new book “Epochal Crisis: the Exhaustion of Global Capitalism,” saying if you want to understand what is going on in the world, then read this.

Last week the Mirror newspaper exposed the case of an 87-year-old man, a sufferer of prostate cancer, who waited 15 hours for an ambulance after falling outside his house in Cornwall. Unable to move him, his family built a makeshift tent to keep off the rain. Conservative Party leadership contenders Rishi Sunak and Liz Trust have solutions for the NHS crisis—lots more privatisation. This means that you will now only wait 15 hours for an ambulance if you don’t have the right health insurance—in other words, if you are poor.

Although Liz Truss has largely succeeded in outflanking her rival Rishi Surnak to the right[1] on economic policy, by contrast on social issues[2] and foreign policy Surnak and Truss have played a game of right-wing leapfrog, each dragging the other successively toward more hard-line positions.